Analysis It's been a crazy storage news year with a furious blitz of announcements and events, some of which stand out more than others. This is my personal selection of the main news events, some still ongoing, that impressed me during the year. First up is the longest-running one of all – Toshiba's chip business sale. Toshiba chip …

Dell EMC is halting development of file services on its XtremIO all-flash block access array. According to Sam Grocott, SVP for product marketing in the Storage and Data Protection division, Dell’s customers said they didn’t need another system supplying file services from Dell EMC, as they were already well served with file …

The state of California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system shows that 68 DSSD staff are being laid off. Dell closed down its high-performance NVME solid state drive and fabric connected DSSD D5 array earlier this month because there was an insufficient market for the product. At the time Dell said …

+Comment A year after first shipping the DSSD D5 array, Dell Technologies is axing the standalone product. It will sprinkle the technology into its storage and platforms groups; that will, it is hoped, speed up applications on these systems by exploiting high-speed access to NVMe drives. EMC bought DSSD in May 2014 for a suggested $ …

+Comment Mangstor quietly changed its CEO and no one noticed. This NVMe-over-fabrics accessed, NVMe drive array startup is now run by president and CEO Craig Gilmore, who lists no previous professional involvement with storage array and server-storage access technology in his LinkedIn CV whatsoever. Get this – Mangstor’s announcement …

Interview An array without limits sounds a great idea and the ADS 1000 is built by a startup whose name, Apeiron, is Greek for without limits. Its ADS1000 uses hardened Ethernet to have array network access latency cut to <3 µS for a round trip. That’s fast. Fast_Ethernet_speeds_ADoption_650 Fast Ethernet with no stack obstruction is …

Dell EMC President David Goulden has reorganised the core products group, re-arranging core and emerging technologies, with consequent executive movement. We saw an aspect of this late last week, with Guy Churchward and CJ Desai leaving to pursue C-level opportunities elsewhere. The old product divisions were: Servers - …

Interview The most high profile NVMe-using array is Dell EMC's all-flash, 10 million IOPS D5, the much anticipated product of its billion-dollar acquisition of DSSD. We asked Mike Shapiro, VP Software for DSSD, questions about how DSSD views NVMe as part of our NVMe interview series. His answers are below. During the process, news hit …

The Register's storage desk has learned that DSSD President Bill Moore has left Dell EMC. EMC acquired DSSD in 2014, when the prey company had revealed its intentions to build rack-scale flash storage rigs, but was still in stealth mode. Moore co-founded the company, along with Jeff Bonwick who remains a VP and CTO at Dell …

Comment A new phase of disruption is hitting the performance data storage array market, giving new, old, startup and struggling all-flash array vendors a shot at making it big by using NVMe flash drives and NVMe Fabric-class connectivity to provide direct-attached SSD performance from external arrays. The charge is being led by Dell- …

Analysis Excelero is working on its new NVMesh software to connect shared NVMe SSD storage with accessing servers and their applications. The aim is to deliver a centralised, petabyte-scale, block storage pool with local, directly-connected NVMe SSD access speeds, using commodity server, storage and networking hardware. The company …

Israeli startup E8 has launched its rack-scale NVMe over Fabrics E8-D24 array at the Flash Memory Summit, saying it has the storage array Holy Grail, setting up a direct competition with EMC’s DSSD product. The Holy Grail is a trifecta of high performance, low cost, and high availability. E8 says its customers get to overcome …

Ehud Rokach, XtremIO's general manager and previously CEO before EMC bought it, is going to take a break from the biz he cofounded. His replacement is Dan Inbar, once CEO at N-trig, which Microsoft acquired, and a SanDisk exec. EMC announced Inbar’s appointment as CEO of XtremIO this week in Israel, where XtremIO is …

Comment A rumour from last week implied EMC was considering shutting down its XtremIO product line. How likely is it – and is there any basis to EMC taking this direction? The rumour seemed to come from a number of separate parties, although we can’t exclude a clever viral marketing campaign from a competitor. XtremIO history EMC …

Backgrounder If hero numbers are what you want then E8 Storage's 2U box filled with 24 NVMe SSDS can provide them; 10 million 4KB IOPS using RDMA over an Ethernet fabric connecting up to 100 servers. The company provided more information about the product to an IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley, with CEO and cofounder Zivan Ori and product …

EMC World's second day saw hyper-converged rackery put front and centre, with a stronger DSSD offering, Neutrino* nodes coming to the VxRack 1000 as well as a DSSD variant, and a hybrid cloud VXrack offering. We'll check out the Neutrino rack stuff first. The VCE VxRack 1000 is a hyper-converged, servers+storage+networking+ …

Comment X-IO Technologies' Axellio* is a rackmount hyper-converged server/all-flash storage platform that will be sold through OEM, ODM and system integrators – and it provides an almost unbelievable combination of performance and density. The company has been working on the technology for two years, developing a third product line, …

Backstory It's not vapourware, this scale-up Ethernet cluster-in-a-box that Pure calls FlashBlade, but it's sure not hurrying to market. Announced yesterday, March 14, it's expected to be generally available by the fourth quarter, although we understand Pure engineers could take until the end of the year to finally clear it for GA. The …